Indian Pacific Train Stats -
Route: Sydney - Adelaide - Perth
Duration: 3 nights in either direction
Distance: 4352 kilometres
I was only going from Adelaide to Perth, so it was just a mere 2 nights, or 39 hours, but I really really wished I'd brought a sleeping bag and a pillow with me because they dont give you one. I also wished I'd brought a change of clothes but I'd checked in my big rucksack into the baggage car and couldn't get at it. 30 minutes into the journey I was wishing that I'd taken the plane.
The worst thing that can happen to you on any long, cramped and confined journey is having to sit next to a nutter for 39 hours. Fortunately I was sitting next to a lovely old woman - yes, she talked too much, wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways and her feet smelled when she took her shoes off, but she was all there mentally so I considered myself lucky. The people 6 or 7 rows in front of me weren't so fortunate as they had a class 1 certified lunatic circling around them. He was on definitely on something - I don't know what it was, day release from a mental hospital would be one possibility - and he kept walking up and down the corridor talking really loudly to everyone people: "Free showers! They've got free showers up the front. Hey mate, go have a shower - it's free...". He also decided that his seat was a different one to that on his ticket and every time the train manager showed him back to his seat and explained patiently what "28A" meant, he'd get up and walk back to the seat he thought he should be in. This was really annoying, particularly for the guy who was trying to sit in it.
After a while the rightful occupant of his adopted seat gave up, conceded his place and went and sat in the lounge car. This left the mad guy sitting next to a Japanese girl who braved 5 minutes conversation before collapsing in floods of tears. Then the passengers revolted and it all got personal. He seemed to think that the the train company, staff and all the passengers were racist because he was the only aboriginal in the carriage and we were all picking on him. No-one pointed out that we were only picking on him because he was the only arsehole in the carriage, but i doubt that piece of logic would have altered his opinion. Twenty minutes later the train made an unscheduled stop in the middle of nowhere to offload one passenger into the back of a waiting police car, and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief.
One of the reasons I'd wanted to take the train was to see the Nullabor Plain, which is a 200,000 square km pancake flat, treeless area that runs 1200km between South and Western Australia (literally,
null arbour = "no trees" in latin).
It's an area so vast and so empty that you just cannot imagine. So why the hell did I want to see it? I guess it's because not many people do, especially not the whole 1200km of it anyway. When you look out the window at the start of the plain, it looks exactly the same as it does a day later when you look out again. It's like in cartoons where Fred Flintstone is driving along and he keeps passing the same looping scenery. I could have just bought a postcard I guess... probably would have been easier.
We made two stops - the "town" of Cook, population 5 and Kalgoorlie, population lots. Also, when instructed by the train driver, we all looked out the window and waved at Ziggy the Hermit's house - a guy who lives on his own in the middle of the plain because he can't stand crowds. It struck me that 500 people on a train staring through his living room window probably wasn't the most sensitive thing we could be doing to a guy who hates human contact, but if you will build your house next to the railway line and call yourself "Ziggy the Hermit" you're asking for it really aren't you?
Kalgoorlie was interesting - it's a rough mining town that produces most of Australia's gold and also most of Australia's dirty old miners. We stopped there for 4 hours and spent most of it in the pub, briefly having a look at some old hotels from the goldrush and a few still functioning brothels in Kalgoorlie's famous red light district. It's got a pretty busy nightlife and a surprising number of trendily dressed young people going out in the pubs and clubs. I was just expecting to see a couple of old farts round a camp fire with a banjo, but there's actually quite a few really stunning women. Either they're attracted by the vast quantities of gold, or they have a thing about rough men with long dusty beards and dubious personal hygiene. Hmmm... I wonder which one it is...
The beers we had in Kalgoorlie send me to sleep for the night and I woke up the next day with just a few hours to go before we got to Perth. They were pretty long hours though, as I was being lectured by an English couple on what I could expect to find in Western Australia. (Really??? They have kangaroos there? In Australia? Surely not!!!)
After 39 hours I arrived, smelly and tired in Perth.
Nothing exciting happened at Port Hedland - nothing exciting ever does. The only thing that came close was some Swedish people making us lunch and mistaking a courgette for a cucumber and eating it in their sandwiches. We didn't tell them until afterwards because they were loving it so much.
We left the coast behind and headed inland to Karijini National Park - a series of red rock mountains covered in bright green spinifex bushes. We collected some firewood in the evening for a camp fire and I sat on the roof of the truck to make sure it didn't fall off as we drove back. I think ropes might have been a better idea as there was nothing to make sure I didn't fall of as we bumped along the dirt track. At the end I got off battered and bruised and covered in little bits of wood.
The best part is the spiderwalk, where you have to wedge your legs on either side of the canyon and shuffle along for about 30 metres- hoping that you don't slip and drown your digital camera in the water below. Nina wore a very short skirt. I haven't published the photo that I have of her in the interests of taste and decency, but if anyone wants to see it then let me know...
That evening I created the eighth wonder of the modern world - a boot drying device engineered from eucalyptus branches and pure ingenuity. A beautiful cantilever arrangement of natural materials as sublime in form as it was in function. It took at least an hour to perfect and in the end could dry three pairs of shoes over the camp fire concurrently! Then Andreas came along and put his shoes out to dry on the back of a deck chair.
More snorkelling for us in Exmouth, slightly further up the coast from Coral Bay, but still on Ningaloo Reef. The great thing about Ningaloo is that it's so close to the shore that you can actually swim off the beach and reach the coral, so no need for expensive boat trips to get you to the action. We travelled to Turquoise Bay for a whole day's relaxation on the beach. It struck me that I haven't done that in so long because I've been moving around so much so it was a really good day.
After lunch we made up an olympic style relay race involving speed-walking, swimming, running through water and finally running backwards wearing flippers. I chose to do the running through water (waist deep).
We arrived at Coral Bay in the evening having plenty of time to sink a great many beers before the bar closed. Mia hit me in the eye with a pool ball when we were playing pool. I think she did it on purpose as payback for all those Monkey Mia jokes the day before.
The next morning we had to get up to do a full day's snorkelling on Ningaloo Reef - Western Australia's equivalent to the Great Barrier Reef. Being WA it doesn't get even a quarter of the traffic that the Barrier Reef does, so you don't have to use spear guns to fight off Japanese tourists. After a really heavy night before the last thing I was feeling like was 8 hours bobbing up and down on a boat, but I dragged myself on board anyway. At least we'd get to see the fish feeding if I heaved over the side.
The main focus of the day was to swim with manta rays. The boat had a spotter plane flying overhead to locate the shadows of the huge beasts in the water and then direct the skipper to where they were. Once we'd located them one of the crew swam out to where they were and we followed behind, then tracked the manta ray as it swam and barrel-rolled around the ocean. We'd been told not to get infront of them as if they get spooked their natural reaction is to charge, using their 2 tonne weight and 5 metre wingspan to thump you out of the way. Easier said than done as the mantas kept on turning around every 30 seconds so that they were looking right at you. Pretty amazing stuff, and very good exercise as they can really shift.
After the mantas we went and snorkelled over the reef. The visibility wasn't great, but there were quite a few fish around -not least because the crew of the boat kept on throwing bread in the water. There was a cameraman on board who kept on snapping photos of people as they dived. Rory bought the photos on a cd and we all gave him some money to post us copies when he got home the next week. I could be wrong but I don't think any ever got sent to my home address in England. He was making jokes like "that's the easiest $100 I've ever made" and "never trust an Irishman" when we were handing over the money, which just makes things worse! The scoundrel!
I'd been looking forward to getting to Monkey Mia for ages, but I wasn't too fussed about what we'd see there. Monkey Mia is a resort that sells itself as the place to see wild dolphins being fed from the beach - it's actually illegal to feed them most other places as it disrupts their natural feeding patterns. But I wasn't there for the dolphins. I was there because we were travelling with a Finnish girl called Mia - and going to a place called Monkey Mia opened up a whole world of cheesey comedy potential...
In the end everybody was far more impressed with the dolphins than my poor jokes. I'll concede that watching a dolphin eating a fish is marginally more exciting than watching an Englishman pointing at a sign and laughing by himself.
Hamelin Pool in Shark Bay National Park is home to some of the oldest and most unique creatures on the planet - cyanobacteria - which form large rock mounds underneath the sea just for tourists to go and look at. As the pools are so sheltered and salty most animals can't get there to disturb the delicate balance that keeps the cyanobacteria alive. So there are only a couple of places in the world today where you can see stromatolites and Western Australia has the best examples.
Scientists believe that the stromatolites might be the most ancient living things on the planet. Just as we were leaving, a tour bus from Casey Australia Tours pulled up and disproved this by unloading its cargo of doddery geriatric pensioners (who outdate the stromatolites by 20 years). What do you know? We got to see two types of living fossil in one day!
We'd stopped in the layby on some very soft sand and the wheels had dug in so that the truck was firmly stuck.
The Pinnacles are thousands of yellow limestone peaks sticking out of the sand in Nambung National Park. They range in height from a few centimetres up to a couple of metres, and cover an area the size of several football fields. They look a bit like small standing stones that you might find in Britain, only these were formed naturally by erosion and the leeching of lime from crushed seashells into the ground.
It's an area so vast and so empty that you just cannot imagine. So why the hell did I want to see it? I guess it's because not many people do, especially not the whole 1200km of it anyway. When you look out the window at the start of the plain, it looks exactly the same as it does a day later when you look out again. It's like in cartoons where Fred Flintstone is driving along and he keeps passing the same looping scenery. I could have just bought a postcard I guess... probably would have been easier.
When I got back to Adelaide Julia and Christine (German girls from the Great Ocean Road) had just got back from 2 weeks fruit picking. Fruit picking can be a cruel business as you get paid exploitatively and worked exhaustively. It also doesn't help if it rains all the time and you can't work, so Julia and Christine had come back from their 2 weeks having earned (after expenses) roughly $40. I told you jobs are for losers.
Our first stop was the "World's Biggest Rocking Horse". It's pretty big, though if i were you I wouldn't buy my ticket out to Australia just to see it, even if you really, really love big rocking horses. There's probably better things to see in Australia. Like the big tree just down the road that some crazy family used to live in, or the big dam where you can whisper at one end and other people can hear it perfectly 200m away at the other. The Adelaide Hills are as mad as a chocolate frog.
The reason for all the madness might have something to do with the fact that one of Australia's biggest wine regions in based here - the Barrossa Valley, We stopped at Jacob's Creek for a bit of a tasting and some jokes about spitting or swallowing. Obviously being English I've already sunk many a bottle of $4.99 semillon chardonnay so I was just there to get a photo of the creek itself, but the Germans were expecting a fine wine experience so I could tell they were a bit disappointed when the barmaid served up some cheap plonk. Maybe we should have gone somewhere a bit more upmarket.
I drove them to Hahndorf to make up for it, which is a German town in the hills that I thought would make them feel more at home. This was a mistake. Apparently the town didn't look German, the Sauerkraut was horrible, and don't even get them started on the bread. In fact, don't ever get any German started on the subject of bread. When Basil Fawlty said "don't mention the war" he really should have extended the warning to also include baked goods. To Germans, bread should be a hard black rye brick and if it isn't then this causes them great physical pain. Any mention of the B-word and their eyes roll back into their sockets and they will go off on one about how good the bread is in Germany and how evil it is elsewhere.